


Rules of Fatherhood

by TheWitchBoy



Series: Arrowfam AU: Trouble Comes in Twos [1]
Category: Green Arrow - All Media Types, Green Lantern - All Media Types, Young Justice - All Media Types
Genre: Adoption, Arrow Family, Beginnings, Fatherhood, Mentions of Barry and Iris and Wally, Oliver Queen might not be ready for this, Roy Harper has a twin, Roy Harper's YJ Clone is Ray
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-08 13:32:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12255381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWitchBoy/pseuds/TheWitchBoy
Summary: The boys were mirror images of each other, except that the boy on Oliver’s right wore faded canvas sneakers and a rust-coloured Coca-Cola shirt while the boy on Oliver’s left wore abused running shoes and a Gotham Knights shirt from a previous decade (and the wrong coast).





	Rules of Fatherhood

**Author's Note:**

> The Cast So Far:  
> > Arrowfamily  
> • “Ollie” Oliver Jonas Queen, Green Arrow  
> • Roy William Harper Jr.  
> • Ray Michael Harper  
> > Batfamily  
> • Bruce Alen Wayne, Batman  
> • “Dick” Richard John Grayson, Robin  
> > Misc  
> • “Barry” Bartholomew Henry Allen, Flash II  
> • “Wally” Wallace Rudolph West, Kid Flash  
> • “Hal” Harold Jordan, GL I

**Rules of Fatherhood**

“It’s probably a bad idea.” The phone was caught between the shoulder and ear of a nervous-looking blond man. In his lap and on the console next to him were a splay of papers he’d been skimming, over and over again, on the two-hour trip from Star City. “A really bad idea.”

“ _Oliver, I thought we already went over this whole ‘second thoughts’ schtick_?” Twenty minutes back, the cell service had been great and as crystal-clear as anything. As the minutes ticked by, though, the service got worse.

“Turn left in one hundred feet _,_ ” the GPS intoned.

Oliver glanced at the GPS and felt himself beginning to sweat in earnest. “Fifteen-minute ETA,” he said. He wasn’t proud of the tremor in his voice.

“ _Oh my god, Oll. Do I need to fly down there and give you emotional support_?”

“Oh, like you’d even get it. You’re a chronic bachelor,” Oliver sank down in his seat as Fyff took the prescribed turn.

“ _So are you_!”

“Yeah, but I’m about to be a chronic bachelor with kids,” Oliver scoffed. “Face it, Hal, you’d run screaming, if you were in my shoes.”

Fyff snorted, the traitor.

Oliver tossed Fyff a glare, then set to work putting all his scattered papers back together. He dropped his phone, in the meantime. “I’m starting to think,” he picked the phone back up. “I’m starting to think that Brave Bow had the wrong idea.”

“ _You said that last time you called, too_ ,” Hal said. Or, that’s what Oliver thought he said. The phone was starting to cut in and out something awful.

“But, thirteen. That’s just… so old. I’m too young to deal with teen stuff again,” Oliver sighed.

“ _You’re a big baby, Queen_.”

“Just another reason this whole ‘fatherhood’ thing is a terrible idea,” Oliver moved his phone from one ear to the other and set the papers aside. “What do kids like? Hey, what’s that Allen guy’s kid like?”

“ _It’s not his kid. Wally’s not even really related to him. He’s Barry’s foster sister’s nephew – or something_.”

“Well, what’s he like? He’s a teenager, right?”

“ _Not yet, thank god_ ,” Hal huffed out a laugh. “ _I dunno. He’s a science nerd. He likes science and superheroes and hanging out with the Most Boring Man Alive. And yours truly, of course. Kids find the test pilot angle hard to resist._ ”

“I’m a CEO, not a test pilot.”

“ _Buy their love_.”

Oliver pinched the bridge of his nose. “That… isn’t how it works.” He was pretty sure of that much.

“ _Whatever, man. I have a date – good luck with the sprouts, I guess_.”

“Thanks, Hal,” Oliver tried to sound anything but grateful. But he _was_ grateful. If nothing else, Hal had distracted him, on and off, for the past two hours of doubt and rethinking while Fyff sat behind the wheel. He hung up and set his phone aside, ignoring the red blinking indicator of low battery. The whole trip would have been easier is he’d driven himself, probably. That would have been enough to distract him from the jitters and doubt.

“Almost there,” Fyff said.

“Yeah? Super.” Oliver leaned his elbow on the console and propped up his chin with his hand. No turning back, then.

He was right on time and everything.

\--

Sometimes, things were what they were, no use complaining.

Other times, the universe gave you a brief “out.”

Oliver was ready to thank the whole damn universe when the League called him in. But he refrained. It seemed a bit sleazy to thank the universe for a disaster, even if that disaster meant he got to put off meeting Brave Bow’s boys for another hour or two.

Ugh, no.

His boys. _His_ boys. The paperwork was already done, after all. And Brave Bow couldn’t exactly take it all back, being as he’d passed on almost a month previous. Oliver just had to meet the boys, claim them, and take them back to good ol’ Star City with him.

But still, he’d never been so happy to respond to a kidnapping crisis. (He’d look back, about a year or two afterwards, and laugh about that kidnapping crisis – given that it was the Big Bad Bat’s kid that had been nicked from that West Coast charity gala. The kidnappers could have been facing someone a lot worse than the Green Arrow, given who they’d gotten their grubby mitts on.)

It was a short crisis, solved with a few trick arrows and a well-placed groin kick. The hostage, a cute little thing with big blue eyes who couldn’t have been older than nine or ten, made Oliver give his doubts some doubts. How bad could being a dad be, right?

But then, to give the doubts’ doubts some doubts, Queen Consolidated was a wealthy company with a wealthy CEO, namely Oliver himself, and anyone Oliver brought into the household would probably be risking kidnapping, just like the Richard kid that the League had called him in to un-kidnap.

“Thanks, Mr. Arrow,” the kid said.

Oliver gave him a smile and wave as the police herded him to an ambulance, where a shock blanket waited for him. He didn’t look like he needed a shock blanket.

“ _Crisis averted_?” Fyff interrupted.

Oliver startled and turned away from the kid, the police, the ambulance, and the adoring public beyond it all. “Yeah,” he said, pressing the comm in his ear, “crisis averted. I’m coming your way.”

“ _You might want to make it fast. You’re late_.”

“Late?” Oliver stiffened a little, feeling his hackles raised. He felt a bad first impression coming on, something awful.

“ _Yeah, you were supposed to meet the boys over an hour ago,_ ” Fyff said.

Oliver swore, but forced himself to walk calmly out of sight. He didn’t need any cameras catching a panicked vigilante fleeing the scene. He could just hear the degrading headlines accusing him of a crime. Yeah, no thanks. But, his stress spiked and his face heated. Late to a meeting he set up, himself. That was great. Why did he want to put it all off, again? To purposely make a bad impression?

Once Oliver made it back to the car, feeling less like himself out of the mask than in it, Fyff booked it back to the Reservation. It didn’t save them much time, though. In fact, all it did was get them pulled over three minutes from where they had to get. Which wasted another fifteen minutes for Oliver, while Fyff produced license and registration and bashfully accepted the ticket that the Native cop wrote out for him.

Yeah, a super first impression.

\--

The pair of them were thirteen and so ginger that Oliver thought that Fyff had taken a wrong turn and ended up in the Highlands instead of on the Navajo Reservation. They didn’t have the spray of dark freckles that Allen’s nephew had. But they had the brightest red hair that Oliver had ever seen outside of a box of dye, and that included Allen’s nephew.

Oliver was wearing a white button-up with sleeves rolled to the elbow, dark wash jeans, sturdy work boots, and beads and leather bands around his neck and wrist. In spite of the relatively casual look, he felt insanely overdressed. Maybe it was the Ray-Bans, or the healthy tan he’d bought himself (literally, given his night activities). Maybe it was how faded the boys’ old graphic tees and older, hole-ridden jeans were.

The boys were mirror images of each other, except that the boy on Oliver’s right wore faded canvas sneakers and a rust-coloured Coca-Cola shirt while the boy on Oliver’s left wore abused running shoes and a Gotham Knights shirt from a previous decade (and the wrong coast).

“Uh,” Oliver rubbed his hand over his mouth and down the scruff of unshaven beard.

The green eyes of one twin sought out the green eyes of the other. They didn’t look impressed. They returned their gazes to Oliver after a moment. Oliver was a little creeped out by the synchrony, moreso when they crossed their arms, perfect mirrors of one another.

“What are your names?” Oliver asked. He knew their names. He just… didn’t know which was which. “I’m Oliver Queen.” He mustered a smile and offered a hand to the boy on the right. When he failed to get a reaction, he tried the boy on the left.

“Harper,” the one on the left answered, after Oliver had dropped his hand in defeat.

“I was hoping for first names,” Oliver’s grin felt strained, but he kept it in place, carefully. Maybe teenagers were like dogs? Maybe they could smell fear?

“Roy and Ray,” the boy on the right said. He kept his arms crossed, though, and didn’t indicate which of them was Roy and which of them was Ray.

“Ray, huh? I know a Ray. Palmer. Brilliant man,” Oliver said. “Bit of a ditz, if you ask me, but I guess brilliance without cost isn’t… you know…”

“God. You know what? Roy,” the one on the left pointed to his twin. “And Ray,” he pointed to himself. “Just… shut _up_. We don’t like you, we don’t like the arrangement, and we don’t want to play nice just because you’re nervous.” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked away from Oliver.

“Okay,” Oliver mirrored the boy – Ray’s – posture, rubbing the back of his neck. “Uh.” He dropped his arms, shrugging. “Uh, yeah. Who’s up for a two-hour car ride into Star City?”

The other boy – Roy – scoffed. “Yeah, whatever. Whatever! C’mon, Ray,” he threw his arms in the air, then grabbed his brother’s elbow and pulled him over to their bags. One bag each. It wasn’t a lot, far from it, but it was theirs. “This is stupid.”

Ray picked up his bag and let himself get dragged over to the car and Fyff.

Oliver kind of just… stood there for a few minutes more, staring after them. That didn’t go very well. But it didn’t go quite as badly as expected, either.

**Author's Note:**

> Notes:  
> • Roy and Roy’s Clone (courtesy of Young Justice) are Roy and Ray.  
> • Wallace Rudolph II is “Ace,” here, while Wallace Rudolph I (“Wally”) is the ginger Wally.  
> • Plans to include Mia, Conner, and Robert II are in place for the Arrowfam.
> 
> If you ever see a (middle) name you aren't familiar with, I probably made it up (ex: Bruce Alen), but, if I did my job right, the names should fit well enough where they don't get questioned (ex: Alen is the name of Bruce's great-great-grandfather).
> 
> Sidenote: I fully intend to have (let) this crossover with the Three Brothers AU. "Will that not make it more complicated?" Yes, I'm sure it will. But why work on a roster of characters if not to slip them into anything and everything they are amenable to slipping into?


End file.
